It all began with a simple need: to understand how we move through a universe we live inside but never see.
As a child in Brazil, I’d watch our fish at the glass of their bowl, wondering what they thought about the world moving beyond. To them, everything must have seemed contained in that small space. They had no idea anything was happening outside. Years later, I recognized this as my childhood version of Plato’s Cave.
Learning to see differently takes effort. Picasso created eleven lithographs of the same bull, each one simpler than the last. He kept removing details until just a few essential lines remained, and somehow that captured the bull more truly than the realistic version. Abstractionism removes what obscures until only what matters remains.
Patent practice produces many abstractionists because it trains three critical skills: perspective-switching, taking the same situation from every actor’s viewpoint at once; examining across levels, like how a computer has hardware and software as distinct domains that interact without collapsing into one thing; and distinguishing causation from response, the difference between “the music made me dance” and “I danced in response to the music.”
When life got complicated, I started applying this thinking to personal situations and relationships. Anything could look entirely new depending on your viewpoint. Different types of activity followed distinct rules. Most importantly, what happens and what we think happens turned out to be orthogonal things. That’s where I discovered what I eventually named Incoherence, and where I learned that influence works by induction, not the direct contact most people imagine.
What started as personal exploration became Natural Reality, a way of understanding our process universe. My children were the original audience. If we could understand that we build our reality, we could learn to participate more deliberately in what’s happening.
“Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.” (Happy is the one who has been able to know the causes of things.)
— Virgil (70–19 BCE)
Recognizing the causes behind our perceptions changes everything. When we know how our experiences get built, we stop chasing what we think should make us happy and start cultivating the conditions that do.
New ideas about Natural Reality still keep forming within my Red Space. Many arrive backward, the way abstractionists work.
“Abstractionists, of which there are very few, specialize in solving problems in a backward fashion, and from a distance.”
— Nimbin and The Abstractionist
The same logic applies to minds. The ‘neurotypical’ brain is itself a construction, a useful fiction, and there is no center. Natural Reality shows each person building their own inner world.
Once we understand this, we worry less about what consciousness and free will mean in theory, and instead pay attention to how we interact: how we create our perceptions and influence what’s around us in each moment.
The Abstractionist Movement continues with you. In a world where billions of us interpret everything differently every day, we need better ways of living through that complexity.
My parents tell me that before I could speak, I’d grab their faces with both hands and make sounds directly into their eyes, desperate to be understood. I’ve spent decades since learning what that toddler couldn’t know: all meaning lives inside.
Why did I dedicate so much to this project? The face-grabbing toddler and the grown man mapping hidden dimensions are the same person, spending a lifetime moved by his own incompleteness.
Welcome to the Blue Space.
/Luiz von Paumgartten, The Abstractionist